Mailbag: Stakeholder management and its limits

Plus: American musical dominance, what went wrong on immigration, and the "Matt Yglesias fan club"

After a prolonged effort to steal the seat, North Carolina Republicans have thrown in the towel and conceded defeat in the Supreme Court race against Democrat Allison Riggs. This race on its own doesn’t have huge implications, but it’s one step on the way to securing a Supreme Court majority that would force North Carolina to un-gerrymander its congressional and state legislative districts and bring a greater dose of democracy to an important state.

I bring this up not only because it’s important on its own terms, but also because Riggs was one of our Slow Boring recommended donations back in the 2020 cycle.

Our readers delivered over $50,000 in contributions, which in a race that was ultimately decided by only about 800 votes, likely made a difference. Hard dollars go a long way in down ballot races, so thank you to everyone who stepped up. There are always a lot of haters out there, but beyond any big ideological points, I think it’s a reminder that seeking to distinguish truth from falsehood and trying to engage in politics constructively rather than expressively are really important tasks. That’s how you identify high-leverage races, move resources to where they’re valuable, and ultimately squeak out wins that could have been losses.

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Jeff: You often discussed how Biden prioritized “coalition management.” But why did he so often feel compelled to placate Dems' left wing over other goals? This is particularly odd to me, given that it appears to have started right after he won the primary, which of course, he won for being moderate instead of left wing. In part, I am also wondering about this because I wonder what will happen if a ‘moderate’ wins the primary in 2028: will they feel compelled to pivot to the left? We need some understanding of why this happened with Biden.

You could analyze this on a number of levels, but one potentially powerful lens is to reflect that Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz all ended up on national tickets because they were skilled coalition-managers.

One might think that if you’re looking to hire someone for the job of beating Donald Trump in a national campaign, it would be good to hire someone who has a track-record of winning elections in the pivotal states. But across the five people nominated to run against Trump as president or vice president, none of the five had ever won a statewide election in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, or Nevada. And that’s not because they were winning redder states, either. The closest we got to a really solid hire was Kaine, who did win a statewide race in Virginia back in 2005 when it was red-leaning and in 2012 when it perfectly matched national partisanship.

Part of what makes these coalition-management experts such aggravating choices in the wake of defeat is that as coalition-managers par excellence, they are not leftist rabble-rousers. So nobody on the left really feels responsible for the defeats of the Clinton-Kaine or Harris-Walz tickets, because they feel (understandably) that these are establishment politicians who are part of what’s now a decade-long effort to hold back the Bernie Sanders Insurgency.

But my perspective is that a big part of how these establishment candidates have been holding back the insurgency is by constantly giving up ground to the left — or in Clinton’s case, by hitting Bernie from the left on identity politics.

I think a candidate who succeeds in 2028 will be someone who does not define themselves as a moderate, but as an “outsider” and a “fighter.” You hear this take from a lot from people who are super-duper left-wing, because they want to deny the obvious reality that moderates do better in elections and that voters feel Democrats are too left-wing, especially on cultural issues. So I think the key thing is that person does, in fact, need to be moderate on key issues. But just as Trump moderated on Medicare without defining himself as a moderate, the winning figure will define moderation in terms of being a fighter who’s sick and tired of losing.

Sachin: What did you make of the reporting that Marc Andreessen named his elite right-wing group chat the “Matt Yglesias Fan Club?” How does having this type of audience influence your writing?

I have several thoughts about this.